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A Price Tag for the Gowanus Cleanup

By Mireya Navarro December 27, 2012 7:43 pmDecember 27, 2012 7:43 pm

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A cleanup involving an area of New York City where millions of people live will be carried out in as minimally a disruptive manner as possible, a regional E.P.A. official says.Credit Environmental Protection Agency

The Superfund cleanup of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn is expected to cost $467 million to $504 million and will require dredging the 1.8-mile waterway to remove contaminated sediment, the federal Environmental Protection Agency said on Thursday.

The agency, releasing an updated plan for public comment, is also proposing controls to prevent raw sewage discharges by the city, which have been an ongoing source of contamination.

The worst contamination of the Gowanus however, comes from its past as a major industrial transportation route for paper mills, tanneries, chemical plants and other businesses that operated alongside it. The waterway is polluted with more than a dozen contaminants, including PCBs and heavy metals like mercury, lead and copper.

Despite the heavy contamination and government advisories against fishing, officials say that some residents continue to eat fish from the canal.
“The proposed cleanup plan for the Gowanus Canal will make essential progress in removing toxic contaminants from this heavily polluted and battered waterway,” Judith A. Enck, the E.P.A.’s regional administrator in New York, said in a statement. “Our overall goal is to reduce pollution and protect the health of people who live and work in this community.”

In a phone interview, Ms. Enck said she expected the plan to be finalized by the end of next year. The design phase will then take about two years, and the cleanup itself will take until 2020, agency officials said.

“This is an area where millions of people live, and we’re going to work with the community so this is the least disruptive as possible, especially to local businesses,” Ms. Enck said.

Among the parties helping to pay for the cleanup are the city and other entities associated with the pollution of its waters, including National Grid, formerly the Brooklyn Union Gas company.

The Gowanus was added to the federal Superfund list in 2010 over the objections of the Bloomberg administration, which feared that the designation would deter development and had proposed a streamlined cleanup that it would help oversee. City officials have also clashed with the EPA over how to address the sewage overflow issue, given the costs the city would incur in seeking to address it.

But on Thursday, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, which handles sewage treatment, said in a statement: “We look forward to carefully reviewing the details of E.P.A.’s proposal and working with our state and federal partners to improve water quality and support the cleanup of the canal.”

The E.P.A.’s plan involves dividing the canal into three segments. For the first two, more heavily contaminated segments, the agency plans to dredge or “stabilize” the sediment in some areas by mixing it with concrete or a similar material and then capping it with layers of clay, sand and gravel.
The third segment would be dredged and capped with sand, the agency said.

To prevent recontamination after the cleanup is completed, federal officials are also proposing installing controls at two major city outfall sites that discharge sewer overflows into the canal. The controls — basically, holding tanks that would retain excess sewage and stormwater until the city’s treatment plants can handle it — could reduce discharges of raw sewage by
58 percent to 74 percent, the agency said.
Two public meetings on the cleanup plan are scheduled, on Jan. 23 and 24, and the E.P.A. is accepting public comments until March 28. Written comments on the proposed plan should be addressed to:

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